Rex Harrill writes:

>Jean-Louis tried to make a point by creating a non-sarcastic sacasm that
>made a point for me 100 times better than any point *I* could have made:
>
>> People have [high] cholesterol because they eat
>> unhealthy animals but cows raised on high-Brix grass have a better
>> fatty-acid profile.
>
>Thank you, thank you, thank you---people for years have told me about this.
>I know you were having fun, but it appears you inadvertently dumped out a
>great truth. Sure, a very big problem with today's beef is that it is fed
>low-quality *grain* in huge feeding lots (where is Don Wiss when I need
>him?) and the fatty-acid profile degenerates.

I don't have the time or inclination to get dragged into an interminable
debate here, but wanted to make a few comments.

Rex, I think JL's point above is that there is more to quality of a diet
than the brix of specific *individual" foods in the diet, and that the SAD
diet is "sad" because of more than just the fact it contains (bad) cow
meat. Saying bad cow meat = SAD diet in and of itself ignores many other
factors. Such as that what defines the SAD diet more than any other thing
is it's a diet based on extremes of imbalance in proportions of foodstuffs
(for instance, high in refined sugar, low in unprocessed fruits/veggies,
high in trans-fats, high in salt, for starters), or certain items being in
the diet at all (soft drinks, french fries, etc.). Such things have nothing
to do with brix, and would be there, high-brix or low-brix, even if certain
things about those foods were modified to whatever degree depending on
their specific brix levels. Quality of diet has as much or more to do with
the balance or proportions of different foodstuffs in the diet as it does
with the range of quality levels of the specific items in it.

15-20 years ago I worked in the word processing dept. of a large corporate
restaurant chain conglomerate, typing up all sorts of interdepartmental
correspondence. One thing I still remember is that the food-service wonks
there were very concerned that the brix levels of their soft drinks were
quality-controlled to the appropriate range. The problem with brix being
one's primary measure of quality is that it doesn't distinguish between the
value of different foodstuffs being in the diet at all, or in what
proportions/ amounts. Using brix indiscriminately, one could speculate that
if only people consumed higher-brix cola, french fries, and milkshakes, the
health problems they have on the SAD diet would go away. Now that's an
obviously extreme example for the sake of illustrating a point, but the
same logic applies to the kind of argument you are making about the
long-term results of raw-food veggie diets and/or fruitarianism.

High brix is not going to mitigate the fact that fruitarian diets, for
example, bombard the body with more sugar than most people can handle on a
long-term basis, or that fruits are going to be (because of inherent
genetic constraints) extremely low in essential fats, in protein, etc.,
especially when compared to other foods in the diet such as meats, nuts,
etc., that are much better bioavailable sources. Low-brix or high-brix, the
underlying problem with fruitarian diets is one of an extreme imbalance in
the overall proportion of foodstuffs in the diet.

I don't think people are ignoring brix here. It's just that it's only one
aspect of quality, and in the case of fruitarian diets, it's highly
doubtful it has that much to do with why people fail on it, given the other
far more overarching problems with such a diet.

Ward Nicholson
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